The recent Penguin update, which started to roll out on the 17th of October, has left most of the SEO community wondering what Google wanted to achieve. A damp squib is the most common reference to it and recoveries have been muted with little traffic increase to the sites that have recovered.
Google, as usual, wrapped a couple of other updates into the same weekend. Their spam update and filter erased a lot of low quality sites from...

We are excited to announce our support of the first Open Tech Ireland event on June 30th in Royal Hospital Kilmainham and will be sponsored by KEMP Technologies. A host of international speakers will gather together to discuss, present and participate in the first steps to build an SDN community in Ireland.
With the adoption of software defined networks (SDN) growing rapidly in enterprises , with keynotes from
Bethany Mayer
John Healy
Axel...

This an excellent event for Startups in Ireland and the Mid-West – The Wild Atlantic Start-up Event – 9th of May in the University with Business leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. If you have any interest in investing, start-ups, business or technology, this is for you. We need your participation to ensure that this is a success going forward!
Well done to Shane McCarthy of www.bluechief.ie for organising this much...

SlideShare are clever – and this vanity/ego boost e-mail, which is a really good take on the LinkedIn “Top 1%” and the G+ Year-in-Review auto video will no doubt get some good tweets and shares!
SlideShare can be a great thing for business – if you engage, rank and get shared with really good, high quality content, it rapidly becomes a free channel.
We get more views and traffic on SlideShare than any other...

Thanks to Google’s Webmaster Tools (GWT) team for this weeks latest and much welcomed updates. I’m sure that these two especially will be very warmly received by SEO’s and Webmasters everywhere!
Search Queries and Algorithm Updates
Google is now telling Webmasters in their Search Query Graphs exactly when they updated and changed their algorithm, so you can see inline if your traffic is affected and by which updates. Looks...

Inbound marketing is a big buzzword at the moment along with content marketing and brand journalism and a host of other related phrases that are encapsulated by that phrase.
Social Media is of course an important part of your overall Inbound Marketing strategy but the very unfortunate thing is that too many people don’t use it as Inbound Marketing at all. As Gary Vaynerchuk rightly points out in his book “Jab, Jab, Right...

A new, regular digital meetup for Limerick in the evenings – welcome to LimerickOpen. LimerickOpen, based on DalkeyOpen, is a new extension to the popular Limerick Open Coffee Club format that runs regularly every month. LimerickOpen will be a social monthly, open event (the usual order applies no business cards, pitching, etc).
Please comment if you plan to attend!
#LimerickOpen – We’re here for fun!
Venue: Tom...

Wooop! Google AdWords are allowing indefinite ad rotating again. I could step up on the soap box and go on about being slightly arrogant/hypocritical and make the point that money talks. But I won’t.
Search Marketing: 1
Google AdWords: 0
Instead, I leave you with a lovely Polaroid taken from inside the digital...

Ah, SEO Myths. They’ve been with us forever. Chances are that 50% of the SEO facts that many people hold dear are myths. Almost all of these have been debunked by now (but also subject to change). So what’s the problem? Well, myths are myths and they’re fine if you’re putting a baby to sleep. But when you start running an online marketing campaign – they’re just downright dangerous. While many of...

Here’s where SEO came from
I started in online marketing before search engines were big enough to be a viable marketing platform. Search marketing was very, very basic in 2001-2003. By comparison to the glitzy big data world of today, it was all really cave man stuff. There was no Analytics. There was no Webmaster Tools app. There were no Matt Cutts’ videos. There was no YouTube actually.
There were no funnels, except the one...

Google AdWords tracks conversions by checking to see if a visitor from an AdWords completed a goal or conversion – the measurement point and value are set by the webmaster. But not everybody shops and pays/buys on the same day, so Google allowed a tracking period of 30-days. Even if the visitor came from another source. This is called “First-Step” (or Near-First-Step) attribution. However, if the person came in later,...

Google have been here in Ireland now for 10 years. Since way back at the start of Google and the start of the “Celtic Tiger” (remember that? I think it was put down recently), Google have been a part of the technology landscape here in Ireland.
To commemorate it heres a beautiful site built by Google to showcase their 10 years here.
The site includes a 10 year Zeitgeist look back tool and a fantastic video (embedded...

What’s hot in Social Media right now you say?
An interesting graph of the grow of search for Social Media related services. Looking at Google Trends and comparing the following search phrases seems to indicate that Social Media Consulting (in green) seems to be dying out but the demand for Social Media Training and Social Media managementt is...

In 2010, we started looking at how our clients were managing and copying with Social Media, and realised we’d have to develop
something better. Too many companies develop social media strategies that in effect, are the same as having a mega phone out in a big empty field. Nobody’s listening, so the answer is just to turn up the volume
Yes, we deliver social media strategies and implementation, and we also do content....

In a search for “Facebook Marketing” to see which innovative Irish businesses were ranking well, I was surprised to see a Facebook.com ad!
What’s interesting is that Facebook aren’t exactly doing a great job at it – firstly, they should be trying a lot harder with their display URL – and with a better QS and Domain Match, they should be able to stay at #1 for anything “Facebook”...

I’ve been following the team at WhatClinic.com since we first heard about them in 2008/9 via Bizcamp. Since then, their growth has be unwavering and are now a leading international brand. As with all good start-ups, attracting the best technology talent available is vital, and this innovative recruitment video is good fun.
You can keep up with them via their Tech, Marketing and Health...

Google Support for In-depth Articles in Search and SEO
Google have announced new support for people writing longer articles and in-depth white papers and publishing these online. This includes the support of the Schema “Article” type. This is specifically good for research, students, white papers, authors and journalists, especially investigative journalists. Google posted a light explanation on their blog yesterday, via Pandu...

Over the year, many predictions have been made about Search and online marketing. We made many – on twitter and on our blog post and in comments in fora and Google+. Here they are in one place:
1. An end to Press Release SEO
Most of the Google news for SEO is a mountain of spammy press releases. Badly written, of no news value at all and to serve one function – free ‘publicity’ and links. One large company charges...

2013 is a big year for Search Marketing. People have been searching the internet (the www part) since the appearance of the first search engine, Archie, in 1990. We’re still searching – and not just on Google. Yandex is the supremo in Russia and neighbouring countries and Baidu reigns supreme in China. According to ComScore, dinosaur Yahoo! is still the second biggest web property in the world (after Google)...